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This paper is based on clinical material gathered by psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric social workers with previous prison experience during their work with the Sex Delinquency Research Project of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene at Sing Sing Prison. Tables present the findings in thirty homosexual pedophiles. Thirty rapists and fifty nonsexual offenders were used for comparison.
Glueck describes some psychodynamic factors in the homosexual pedophile and offers four general formulations regarding the sexual offender. 1. The men studied show grave psychiatric disturbance; seventy-six percent of the homosexual pedophiles use some type of schizophrenic adaptation. 2. They show marked fears of approaching a woman sexually, and show fears of genital diminution. 3. They show serious impairment of capacity for abstract thinking and of ability to utilize fantasy or other mechanisms involving abstractive capacity as outlet for sexual conflicts and tensions. 4. Conscience, and its restraining effects on overt behavior, is impaired.
In the past, individual and group psychotherapy with sexual offenders has been relatively unsuccessful. Therapeutic approaches based on the formulation that these are psychoneurotic disturbances are ineffective. Glueck describes use of organic therapies, particularly electroshock, which showed most initial promise.
In his discussion of this paper, Dr. Paul H. Hoch agreed that sexually aberrant behavior is very common in schizophrenics, but he pointed out that the schizophrenic's adaptive impairment goes far beyond the homosexual conflict and that his fear of women is usually secondary to fears concerning personal relationships and is more profound than a genital fear. Impairment of abstractive ability in a group of schizophrenics does not necessarily explain the acting out of the sexual anomaly present in these offenders. Dr. Glueck's belief that impairment of the superego is a factor here cannot be denied, but